Making Sense of Vocation

A series to explore a topic at the heart of life and faith.

There is a certain genre of story that tends to capture our imaginations. In it, a person in relative obscurity is summoned to a great task, suddenly caught up in events of cosmic significance in which he is to play a central role. The Lord of the Rings, the Chronicles of Narnia, and the Star Wars films all fit this description. There are many other similar tales. 

What is it about these stories that we find so compelling? Surely part of the answer has to do with adventure. Ordinary life can be pretty boring. Perhaps more importantly, though, they connect with the matter of significance. We long for our lives to count, to make a difference. 

There is one other thing about the way these stories work, however, that seems important. In each, the main characters are acting responsively. They don’t initiate an adventure, they are called into one. And they are so called because they have somehow been made or destined to play a particular role. They have a vocation. 

Our culture has an interesting ambivalence about vocation. Taking the word literally, it means a calling (from the Latin word vocare: to call) — as in someone actually speaking and summoning one to a specific task or role. Traditionally, that someone is God. 

Why should we be ambivalent about that? Well, on the one hand, I think we all, whatever our theological beliefs, feel the pull of the stories mentioned above. We want to be summoned. We want to know that we have a part to play, unique to us. 

On the other hand, our culture emphasizes the ideal of self-creation. I recently read a quote from an actress that captures this perfectly: “We are our very own makers and have complete control over ourselves: our bodies, our minds, our lives.” From that perspective, a vocation is an unwelcome intrusion.

For my part, I’m not interested in the self-creation project. I’m perfectly happy to be summoned. I’m ready to be in the company of Frodo, Lucy, and Luke. Being a Christian, I embrace a worldview that is vocational at its very heart. The human life is essentially responsive to the initiative and invitation of our creator. I think we resonate with that because we know, at the deepest level, that this is what we were made for. 

But the truth is that there is much about vocation I don’t understand. This has become clear to me as I have found myself in the midst of an extended season of pondering my own vocation. It isn’t a simple matter. 

For one thing, there are questions about what a vocation is. During the Middle Ages, for instance, the word ‘vocation’ tended to be reserved for specifically religious roles. One could have a vocation as a priest, for instance, or a nun. Martin Luther, on the other hand, is credited with democratizing the notion, extending vocation as a universal experience that could apply to any kind of work. Farmer or mother could be vocations just as much as bishop and monk could be. One might also wonder: Need a vocation be life-long? Need it be somehow tailored to who I am?

There are also important questions about how we discern a vocation, assuming we have one. Should we be waiting for a dramatic sense of God’s invitation, like Paul on the road to Damascus? Or are we rather to look to our giftings and personality, searching out that place where “our greatest passion meets the world’s greatest need”?

I have found myself in recent years with unanswered questions in both domains. I have also become increasingly suspicious that the way we often think about vocation in the contemporary protestant church (at least in the U.S.) has been shaped more powerfully by our culture than by a careful reading of the Biblical text. 

Getting this right is important. As I already noted, the Christian story is fundamentally vocational in shape, and the human heart seems to long to find itself within an order into which it has been summoned. So when thinking about vocation we’re touching upon something fundamental to both Christian faith and human life. 

I have seen, in my own life as well as in the stories of friends, hints that our approach to vocation might need adjustment. Many, for instance, are guilty, feeling they ought to be doing more when, from the outside, it appears they are already doing more than enough. Others are anxious, struggling to discover their vocations and afraid of missing it. Still others wrestle with feelings of discontent and chafe against the constraints of life, resentful that they are kept from being able to live their perceived vocation out. 

I realized, too, that the picture of vocation I used to have only made sense in the context of a modern, affluent, individualistic, and free society. It’s fair to say that most Christians in the history of the Church have not lived in such circumstances. Surely the right way to think about vocation will apply to followers of Jesus in any time and place.

For these reasons, I want to dig into the matter of vocation a bit. I desire to explore and understand more fully this central aspect of life and faith. Hopefully, you have some of the same questions I do and will find it useful to follow along. 

I’m not sure how many posts will be in this series, but I anticipate several. I’m going to be approaching this a bit differently than past series, however. Rather than going straight through, I plan to interrupt with some pieces on other topics that are in the mental pipeline. 

Thanks for reading.